This description relates to managing operations on stored data units.
Data storage systems provide various operations for storing, retrieving, or deleting data units (e.g., data units representing individual records). Different systems may use different storage formats, and different techniques for performing the operations. For example, for some systems, deleting data units may involve removing pointers or index entries for locating the data units, or may involve overwriting the data units. Some systems provide features such as data compression or data encryption, which may affect the implementation of the operations, or even which operations are supported. For example, a storage format that includes multiple data units compressed into a single block of data may support deletion of groups of compressed blocks (e.g., old or expired blocks), but might not support deletion of individual data units within those blocks.